News, notes, and anecdotes on the Fort Wayne TinCaps

Potential Playoffs, Prostate Cancer Awareness Night, Hate to Wait

Fort Wayne lost to Dayton last night, 11-1. It was not a game Manager Jose Valentin was happy with:

“We can’t afford to continue to play the type of baseball we’ve been playing lately. Otherwise, I don’t think we are going to last long, or we’re probably not even going to make it to the playoffs,” he said. When he says ‘lately’, here’s what he’s talking about:

Over the last 25 innings, Fort Wayne has scored two runs. In the first three games of this series, the TinCaps have hit .221 (21-95), with the 3, 4, and 5 hitters in the lineup batting a combined 3-32 with 12 strikeouts and four walks. While in the week of August 12-18 the TinCaps bullpen allowed two runs in 22 2/3 innings, it has given up nine runs in the past two games.

For the moment, things have turned difficult for the TinCaps. Starter Frank Garces, who hadn’t suffered a loss since June 6th–a 10-start span–gave up five runs yesterday and took the loss. Fort Wayne has struggled against both Ismael Guillon, who made his Midwest League debut, and Jacob Johnson, who had one win in 15 starts, over the last two days.

With 14 games remaining in the regular season, the TinCaps are still very much in the playoff picture. If the season were to end today, they would be in the postseason. The competition is close, though, with Lake County 1.5 games back and South Bend 2.5 games back. Tonight’s series finale, which pits Fort Wayne’s Colin Rea against Dayton’s Radhames Quezada, along with the upcoming seven-game road trip, will be telling for the TinCaps.

In today’s TinCaps Report Podcast, Manager Jose Valentin talks about his frustration with last night’s loss:

PROSTATE CANCER AWARENESS NIGHT

Tonight the TinCaps will wear these blue jerseys for Prostate Cancer Awareness night. The jersey will be auctioned off after the game, with the proceeds going to Cancer Services of Northeast Indiana.

Men 40 and older who have a ticket to tonight’s game can go to the Lincoln Financial Events Center in right field to have a free screening done, for among other things, prostate-specific antigens. Parkview Comprehensive Cancer Center will be on hand to provide those tests, in addition to screenings for bloog sugar, blood pressure, osteoporosis, height, weight and body mass index.

Kent and I are also scheduled to be joined by a doctor from Parkview Physicians Group to talk about the event and the da Vinci Robot, which will be on display. The robot is:

“…a less invasive surgical technology that offers smaller incisions, less pain and faster recovery for prostate patients. Surgeons from Parkview Physicians Group will be on hand to perform demonstrations, and the public is invited to test their skills by performing mock procedures with the da Vinci robot.”

All else being equal, people who wait less than they anticipated leave happier than those who wait longer than expected. This is why Disney, the universally acknowledged master of applied queuing psychology, overestimates wait times for rides, so that its guests — never customers, always guests — are pleasantly surprised when they ascend Space Mountain ahead of schedule.

This is a powerful ploy because our memories of a queuing experience, to use an industry term, are strongly influenced by the final moments, according to research conducted by Ziv Carmon, a professor of marketing at the business school Insead, and the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. When a long wait ends on a happy note — the line speeds up, say — we tend to look back on it positively, even if we were miserable much of the time. Conversely, if negative emotions dominate in the final minutes, our retrospective audit of the process will skew toward cynicism, even if the experience as a whole was relatively painless.

And speaking of waiting, never forget the “Chat and Cut”:

“The demand for fairness extends beyond mere self-interest. Like any social system, lines are governed by an implicit set of norms that transcend the individual. A study of fans in line for U2 tickets found that people are just as upset by slips and skips that occur behind them, and thus don’t lengthen their wait, as they are by those in front of them.”

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